The publication of this definitive edition of the Book of Common Prayer heralds a significant anniversary; it is 350 years since the final version of the book was authorised by Parliament in...
In his prime, Dr Hewlett Johnson was one of the most famous men in the world. Almost from the moment he was made dean of Canterbury in 1931, he became instantly recognisable everywhere as the Red...
Can capitalism evolve new forms to deflect the seemingly inevitable crisis, or do we need some entirely different social and economic order?
Anxiety about identity stands in for actual drama in Nathan Englander’s ‘corny’ stories.
A scientific fact, like a fetish doll, acquires potency in a framework – or ‘network’ – of specific ideas, habits, material apparatus and professional skills, and the potency of a fact (what we...
How far can judicial review go before it trespasses on the proper function of government and the legislature in a democracy?
A scientist who believes he has something important to tell us about human nature tends to say things like this: ‘If there is any hope of changing the world for the better, from reducing...
As L. Ron Hubbard began to consider himself a religious leader he came to see his writing years as a productive phase of ‘research’. Thanks to science fiction, he had discovered an age when men could...
In 1965-66 the erstwhile folk singer Bob Dylan released a great trilogy of albums, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and set off on a world tour that would...
The misfortunes suffered by Muammar Gaddafi in Sirte on 20 October unfolded in a succession of confused online updates. A report of his capture in a firefight rapidly mutated into claims that...
Legal aid isn’t the sort of thing people worry much about losing. Unlike schools or the NHS, it’s not a part of the welfare state many of us have had dealings with. The sort of people...
‘The second half of this century will spoil by overestimation all the good of me that the first half, by underestimation, has left intact,’ Arnold Schoenberg prophesied in 1949, 16...
I last flew into Sarajevo on 28 June 1994. The besieged city was momentarily quiet. Forces loyal to Milosevic and Karadzic looked down from the hills, but a demilitarisation agreement was holding...
It would be best not to have to die at all, but failing that, many of us would like to have some control over the time and manner of our deaths, should we find ourselves in a condition so...
Writers have seldom been strangers at the scene of an execution. As we know from his London Journal, James Boswell would think nothing of tipping up at Tyburn after a bit of the Old Peculiar on...
‘Blessed is he whose mind had power to probe/The causes of things,’ Virgil wrote, thinking of Lucretius. But for many, knowing the causal origins of things can be reason for anxiety....
There is plenty of evidence about the religious beliefs of the ‘plain man’ in early modern England, but it tells us more about the devout and the learned than it does about the...
Where might you seek Jerusalem? You could start in Bologna, which since at least the ninth century CE has boasted a Jerusalem theme park called Santo Stefano, a complex of churches and chapels...